Our Quaker Vegan Witness symbol is a synthesis of two existing images, and this synthesis can be read as a visual statement about our ongoing practice of peace.
The Quaker Peace Star and the Nobel Dove
The outer form is the eight-pointed Quaker Peace Star, first used in 1870 when Friends working with the Friends War Victims Relief Service adopted it to identify their relief supplies during the Franco-Prussian War, distinguishing themselves from both the Red Cross and the London Daily News Fund whose star they adapted. The star was revived for the same purpose in 1914. In 1947, when British and American Friends were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of that sustained humanitarian witness, a dove carrying an olive branch was added. It is that dove marked by two world wars, by relief work among civilian populations, by the highest international recognition of Quaker peace testimony that sits within the QVW star.
The International Vegan Flag
The colours and geometry behind the dove are drawn from the International Vegan Flag, designed in 2017 by Gad Hakimi and a network of activists to unite the global animal rights movement. White, green, and blue were chosen to represent the natural habitats of animals: sky, land, and sea. The V-shape is an inverted pyramid, intended to symbolise the ability to do the impossible. Its designers also noted that many people read the white negative space of the flag as a bird in flight. In the QVW logo, that latent reading is made explicit: the white V becomes the Nobel dove, the inverted green triangle the earth it witnesses, the blue the sky and sea through which it moves. The two symbols are shown to have always contained each other.
Gentle Compassion and Going Further
Friends have long understood that care for the earth cannot be separated from our other testimonies. The Canterbury Commitment of 2011, Minute 36 of Britain Yearly Meeting called us to renew “our commitment to a sense of the unity of creation which has always been part of Friends’ testimonies,” naming the environmental crisis as inseparable from global economic injustice, and asking us to hold in our hearts that all action “must flow from nowhere but love.“
The 2025 Quaker Earthcare Gathering in Derbyshire took that commitment forward with clarity: “We know that many elements of modern life such as taking flights and eating meat are not compatible with the future we want to see. We need to challenge ourselves and our society with gentle compassion to go further.” The gathering’s epistle also carried words shared in worship from poet Deena Metzger: “there is only time to move slowly, there is no time not to love.“
Quaker Vegan Witness holds these leadings together. This symbol asks us to see vegan living as more than a lifestyle addition to Quaker identity. We invite you to consider it a natural and urgent extension of the peace testimony itself. The same testimony that sent Friends into war zones to tend the wounded, that earned our community the Nobel Prize, that has always insisted the unity of creation cannot be parcelled out to the deserving and undeserving. We believe that testimony now asks us to extend our circle of compassion to all living beings. Please come and join us in that witness.
